Investigations on Stresses and Displacements of Annular Rotating Disc using FEA

Abstract

Engineering components that can be modeled as a rotating disc include the rotor of a turbine engine, saw blades, grinding wheels, and computer magnetic recording disks etc. The rotating disc is subjected to centrifugal force which tends to pull the disc in radial direction, introduces large stresses and displacements on the disc. Further the disc is mounted on a shaft by interference fit. The stresses and displacements of the rotating disc are estimated for potential boundary conditions by building a finite element model using ANSYS. The disc is meshed using SOLID45 elements by taking the rotating disc to be 3D cyclic symmetric model. The contact simulation is done for shaft and disc using surface to surface contacts in ANSYS. The linear isotropic material model is used.
 The model creation for the given dimension with the required material properties is done by APDL (Ansys Parametric Design Language) macro. The user inputs the dimensions of the disc in the macro, which takes care of the model preparation, mesh generation, applying boundary conditions, solution and post processing for the load case. This gives flexibility to change the parameters and material properties according to user specification and saves time for finite element model preparation.